In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Colour Picker and Welcome applets appear for Plasma. Many bugs fixed, especially through the merge of the Summer of Code project "KRDC Revamp". A KPart created, amongst other improvements in Marble. Support for XESAM UserLanguage queries in Strigi. More work, especially in playlist handling, for Amarok 2.0. Improved search interface in KSystemLog. A return to work on KRecipes. KVocTrain is renamed Parley. Restart of development on a successor to the Eigen math library, Eigen2. Start of a port of KMLDonkey, a file sharing frontend, to KDE 4. Parts of the Cokoon decorator infrastructure ported from Python to C++. Security fixes in KDM. Work on page effects in KPresenter. Kross bindings for the Falcon programming language. Import of PyKDE4, new Python bindings for KDE development. KDE SVN housekeeping sees the move of a variety of unmaintained applications to more relevant locations with regard to the KDE 4 release.

It is at about the same stage as the PyKDE4 bindings - it builds fine and you can write apps with the kdelibs classes. It could do with more documentation, more examples, cmake integration and so on, but the basic bindings are there. The Ruby Plasma bindings need a bit more work, but I think that will be a fun way of getting started with KDE4 Ruby programming.

That's about right - I'm working on PyKDE4 docs, examples and related stuff and have been for a few weeks. I think Simon Edwards got the cmake integration taken care of and is keeping up with SVN changes, and also implemented a new pykdeuic.

I've been working with PyKDE4 for a few weeks on an application, and it's been very stable (as has the underlying kdelibs - not many changes lately). I haven't looked at plasma and Python yet, as I'm doing KDE4 from packages, and plasma still doesn't work with the packages I'm using. That should be fixed this week I've heard.

Hm... I see more and more discrete windows beeing added - I hope the developers did not forget about the main principle - making the desktop cleaner and more usable.

Sure - its nice to have 26 versions of the download view ;), but
1) be serious - no one needs more than a tinny progressbar for 99.999% of his time using the computer
2) PLS, dont repeat the situation when we have 10 applets serving the same purpouse and none of them is usable.

Yes, I noticed these were starting to proliferate too. It would be nice to see all progress dialogs from now on changed to tasks in the systray queue, with just an initial notification when the task goes into the queue.

Another important part of that idea was the ability to pause background tasks when you need the power for something else, to change their priority relative to each other, etc. In particular, strigi's searches could be in there.

You raise interesting points, but I should reply:
1)Rather than have 26 different views for different tasks, you can have them all in one place. Doesn't seem too overwhelming. Of course, with KDE's fantastic configurability you'll be able to banish it from your sight if you so desire.
2)The point with plasma is you only need to implement the data stuff once and it is reusable.

But I agree with you that a clean & usable desktop is crucial for KDE 4. This idea doesn't seem to detract from that, but I respect your differing view.

seriously, though, we haven't forgotten. if you feel you too have a good handle on the concepts and ideas (which is turning out to be a relatively rare thing, btw), i recommend trying your hand at creating something with the tools at hand ... you may surprise even yourself.

Hey, I know that all of you have the poster "Keep it simple, stupid" above your desks ;). Still, I care to much to leave everything for you, so I decided to act as a simple "reminder";) Don't be offended just treat all of us - whiners - as kind of "Feedback/QA". All knows We arn't perfect, but who is nowadays.

> Has the info been abstracted into a date engine?
> It'd be great to see this in kde 4.0 plasma,
> but it'd be understandable if time ran out.

What I understand of Plasma now it would be possible to implement such thing. Don't be disappointed though if it's not available with 4.0 yet. I think the plasma developers are working their ass off to get Plasma ready for KDE 4.0. This means getting all basics right. All the potential and foundations will be in 4.0, but it could be that nice applets like a Job overview will emerge with 4.1 instead.

Yes, but remember KDE is in "bug-fixing" mode now. Developers are working towards a 4.0 release. They would keep adding features forever, but at some point you'll have to fix what you have built and release that. That's the plan for the short-term now.

Will it possible to embed Plasmoids, or even part of a Plasmoid as it where a kpart?
I ask because the screen have the nice idea of a download in konqueror being integrated in the main window. It could (mayeb) be done by using a Plasmoid inside it as a kpart.

As the success of the tabs and integrated search in Firefox has already proven, more windows is more annoyance, and getting rid of then when possible is a good idea. :)

It currently works (functions) as a system tray applet, which is even somewhat functional in plasma always. In addition, there is or was some work started on a Data Engine for the jobs, but as of yet, there is no real plasma applet to take advantage of that data engine that I'm aware of :)

There is going to be an applet for KT. I have already experimented with plasma a month or so ago. Currently I'm busy with other stuff for KT, I'm hoping to get the plasma applet going again next month.

Not quit sure how it is going to look like, but it will probably have a chunkbar like in the status tab and show some information about a torrent. Or maybe we can show a graph with the current speeds and stuff like that.

as Alan Denton (the previous comment on this level) points out; it would be nice to have a list of all 'jobs' available in KDE4. this way one could see the progress on all jobs (regular downloads, torrents, copy actions, cd burning, etc) in a singe (plasmoid) dialog.

Indeed. Having KGet and ktorrent duplicate each others functionality is bad enough, now each duplicating the progress thing instead of using the general progress report technology in KDE 4 sucks even more...

To my mind, as long as KTorrent and KGet both feed into the KJob system there's no reason why you couldn't have both - the general KDE progress applet would show percent complete for all jobs including torrents/KGet downloads, but if you want the detailed chunk display then you can use the specific applets.

Hello, love everybody's work. Just wonder if many people still work on kdm, as it is a bit behind GDM feature-wise e.g. no support for failsafe server. This means features like ubuntu's upcoming bulletproof-x (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BulletProofX) can't be used for KDE, which is shame. So do people still work on KDM, cause I notice security fix in this digest but nothing else :(

> A pre-requisite to this [Kubuntu / KDE support] is to have a gdm-style trigger for
> going into failsafe mode. I checked with the KDM guys at UDS, and they confirmed
> it lacks this ability, and it didn't sound likely that it would be added in time
> for Gutsy, so we may need to defer supporting this for now.

I didn't bother finding the related threads at the mailing lists, and the KDM developers probably have a good reason for deferring it. Don't use the "Jump to Conclusions" mat too fast, most things are not what they appear to be at first sight. ;-)

GDM had fail-back feature already and it was just utilized for this purpose. Ubuntu developers only took KDE guidance back-end and developed GTK front end for Display in GNOME and this is also used as front end for new BulletProofX

That's true Canonical is delegating Kubuntu to a second plane, if you take a quick look to the new Ubuntu Gutsy features, most of them are really nice but some of the Kubuntu ones a really stupid and non-polished.

- The artwork does not look as professional as Ubuntu (the first things I do after a Kubuntu install is to set up to normal the original KDE settings and remove the Trash applet in kicker)
- How do you compare Synaptic with the buggy Adept (anyway is doing a good progress)
- Beagle vs Strigi?
- Compiz Fusion still sucks in KDE because the lack of integration with the virtual desktops
- A virtual keyboard is a major feature?
- A kde 3 version of Dolphin by default? perhaps the kde 4 version is quite estable and featured but the one included... why don't let Konqueror as usual?
- Knetworkmanager never worked for me in Kubuntu but in Ubuntu perfectly
- Please don't add patches to KDE as the launch notificacion icon (like Mac OS X do)
- You need some tweaking until fonts look good, in Gnome they look crisp and readable
- Add multi input (i.e Japanese) in Kubuntu is a mess, in Ubuntu is only one click in language preferences panel)
- The redesign of the control panel is a good idea but is not well done. Always with sudden resizes and... very chaotic... hope will be fixed for KDE 4.

In conclusion... I'm a bit dissapointed with the lasts Kubuntu releases, Ubuntu is really nice with Gnome, for a distribution with KDE use Mandriva or Suse are a much better solution.

Sorry about the post, but I need to give a bit of feedback (also do in launchpad).

Hi
the list is not what is BEING done on Kubuntu Gutsy, I really agree that Kubuntu is not a first class citizen of canonical, and I agree that Kubuntu Feisty was not as good as Ubuntu, but in Gutsy, things are changed, Kubuntu has Restricted-Hardwares and Restricted-Multimedia manager and many more things, Adept, works well, I cannot agree that its Buggy, but it needs a complete ui redesign.Artwork is just good on KDM theme and Splash Screen's Kicker looks like crap, Icons should be changed, Crystal SVG is great but we need another icon theme, but I think Kubuntu is the best KDE Distro out there for Desktop, while its not as good as Ubuntu.
some of the points you said are KDE based not Kubuntu, and some other are about bugs...
Compiz-Fusion is not nice on Kubuntu because they created to be on Gnome and gtk+, then KDE things came on for KDE (like aquamarine) and it still hasnt any KDE/QT settings manager (AFAIK), what you except from Kubuntu guys? they cannot do everything...
Still I want to stick this with KDE4, KDE's development is on 4.x for a few years (at least 1-2), so Kubuntu uses KDE which is 'outdated', I hope KDE4 will be a step forward for KDE Distro's and in a few years, KDE Based distro's will have a better chance to attract normal people.